Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By : Daniel Li
Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By: Daniel Li

Overview of this book

With the over-abundance of tools in the JavaScript ecosystem, it's easy to feel lost. Build tools, package managers, loaders, bundlers, linters, compilers, transpilers, typecheckers - how do you make sense of it all? In this book, we will build a simple API and React application from scratch. We begin by setting up our development environment using Git, yarn, Babel, and ESLint. Then, we will use Express, Elasticsearch and JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to build a stateless API service. For the front-end, we will use React, Redux, and Webpack. A central theme in the book is maintaining code quality. As such, we will enforce a Test-Driven Development (TDD) process using Selenium, Cucumber, Mocha, Sinon, and Istanbul. As we progress through the book, the focus will shift towards automation and infrastructure. You will learn to work with Continuous Integration (CI) servers like Jenkins, deploying services inside Docker containers, and run them on Kubernetes. By following this book, you would gain the skills needed to build robust, production-ready applications.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
The Importance of Good Code
Index

Designing our API


An application programming interface, or API, is the interface through which end users can interact with our application. For an API to work, both the client and the API server must agree on some form of mutually agreed convention, or contract; for a specific type of requests, the client can expect the API to reply with a specific type of response. But to have a "good" API, this contract must also be consistent, intuitive, and simple. Now, let's tackle each criterion one at a time.

Consistent

The principle of consistency is very important in API design. Arnaud Lauret, the author of the book The Design of Everyday APIs, elegantly outlined four different types of consistency in his blog post The four levels of consistency in API design (restlet.com/company/blog/2017/05/18/the-four-levels-of-consistency-in-api-design/), which we've summarized here:

  • Common: Being consistent with the world
  • Local: Being consistent within the same API
  • Transversal: Being consistent across different...